Introduction

The cloud is booming these days, and for good reason! It allows businesses of all sizes to ditch bulky servers and rent space in a virtual data center. One of the most prominent players in the cloud game is Amazon Web Services or AWS for short. Consider it a giant toolbox with handy services to help your business grow.

MetricFire is another excellent tool that can help you keep an eye on your AWS services and anything else you have chilling in the cloud. MetricFire is a platform that offers a monitoring system to visualize your AWS services and other cloud providers. Book a demo or sign up for a free trial to learn more. 

What Is AWS?

AWS is a platform that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). AWS offers services that can be divided into three different areas:

• Global: Top-level services directly related to your account (IAM, Billing, etc)

• Regions: Services related to the regions that you have selected (S3, VPC, DynamoDB, etc.)

• Availability Zone (AZ): Services like EC2, EBS, RDS, Bloc Storage, etc

With data center locations globally, AWS offers a scalable and reliable platform for various business needs.

Top 5 AWS Services

AWS provides many popular services, but some are particularly popular. We will review some of them.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 provides services that can be considered virtual machines with a resizable capacity in the cloud. This means you can launch virtual servers as you need. Whether running a game server or powering a large-scale machine learning algorithm, EC2 adapts to your demands. EC2 services are available for most of the operating systems that we know (Ubuntu, Debian, etc). Let’s say that you have, for example, a business launching a web application that might utilize EC2 instances to handle web traffic or you're launching a web application for a new e-commerce platform; during the process of creating your instance, you should choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which is a pre-configured package (OS) for your server. You should select the instance type (optimized for CPU, memory, bandwidth, etc), the server size, and specifications. You should also configure the network and then launch the server instance.  Within minutes, your server is ready. You can then deploy your e-commerce platform on it.

With the concept of EC2, it’s possible to scale up during high-traffic periods of your business and down during low activity. You can also use EC2 for data processing tasks, gaming servers, and anything else that requires virtual servers.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) 

This helps manage who can access different services on AWS by creating user or user groups and assigning them set permissions. The default account created on AWS is a root user with unlimited privileges (setting, billing, etc). So, for security reasons, creating an admin user on your AWS account with fewer privileges to access some services (EC2, VPC, Docker, database, storage, apps services, etc) is recommended. You can give the admin users permission to create users for team members but not be able to access the billing and credit card information. The admin users can also make system users on AWS. For example, Jenkins deploys docker containers on AWS or pushes docker images to AWS docker repos.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service compatible with database instances like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. When you create your instance, you must select the database type that will be applied and configure some other settings (size, credentials, backups). RDS allows easy setting up and configuring (operating and scaling) a relational database in the cloud to manage a relational database hosting.

There are some use cases of RDS. For example, an E-commerce store can use RDS to manage user purchase histories and product inventory without the headache of self-managing a database setup. RDS hosts databases for web applications, analytics platforms, mobile applications, and more. Once running, you can connect your e-commerce platform to this database to manage products, users, transactions, etc.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service perfect for running high-performance applications like gaming, web, and other applications. It’s perfect for managing NoSQL databases as it supports key values and document storage. For example, a mobile app with millions of users might store user settings and profiles for quick retrieval, even at vast scales. It’s also perfect for high-velocity data applications like gaming, mobile apps, IoT sensor data, etc.

With DynamoDB, you can store user profile data for a social networking mobile app. When setting it up, you must define attributes (e.g., UserID, Name, ProfilePic) and use SDKs or API calls to store/retrieve data from your app to DynamoDB. As users sign up for your app, their details get stored in DynamoDB in real-time.

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that stores, sends and receives messages between microservices. You can also scale distributed systems and serverless applications. It means that you don't need to handle the infrastructure, configuration, patching, or scaling, contrary to RabbitMQ, which requires setup, configuration, and maintenance, which can be time-consuming. It can help you to handle user sign-up confirmation emails for your e-commerce platform. SQS helps ensure a smooth flow of data without any loss by sending, storing, and receiving messages. You can use SQS for an application processing data from multiple sources to queue incoming data, ensuring smooth processing without loss as it uses FIFO to process in sequential order.

You can use MetricFire to optimize the performance of your AWS SQS by reading our article. 

Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis is a service that instantly facilitates real-time data stream processing with low latency. It can capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, such as website clickstreams, database logs, and social media feeds. Instead of its alternative Apache Kafka, Kinesis gives the advantage of being fully managed so that you don't need to handle node management, ZooKeeper (used by Kafka), or other cluster management tasks. Kinesis is designed for real-time data, and analytics can handle large amounts of continuous data from diverse sources. It can also be integrated with a wide range of AWS services, such as Lambda, Redshift, or Athena, making it easy to chain operations and process data streams.

Kinesis can be optimal for financial platforms that stream real-time transaction data and analyze fraudulent activities.

Getting Started with AWS

When you create an AWS account, you automatically get the top-level resources, which are your account. In the account, you can create your infrastructure in any region available in AWS. Each region has an AZ with physical data centres. 

AWS offers a 01-year free tier for some services. You need a valid email address, then choose the type of account (personal or professional) with the corresponding information (name, phone, etc), and you will need to add a payment method that will be verified. It offers some services for free for 12 months, and some others are always free:

• EC2 Free tier for 750h (12 months)

• S3 free tier for 5GB standard storage (12 months)

• RDS free tier for 750H (12 months)

• DynamoDB, 25GB of storage, is always free

• AWS lambda 1 million free requests/month always free

• etc

You should keep in mind that not all services are included in the free tier, so you should verify that the service you want to learn is free. Otherwise, make sure to delete all the ones that you don't need or are not using. Also, some services have some conditions for usage to be considered free (EC2 or RDS 750H, etc.).

Monitoring AWS with MetricFire

MetricFire offers a suite of cloud monitoring tools tailored for AWS. By integrating with AWS CloudWatch, MetricFire provides real-time dashboards, detailed reporting, and alerting mechanisms for your AWS ecosystem. You can monitor MemoryDB, an Amazon-managed database service, with MetricFire by reading our article, which explains everything you need to know. 

MetricFire offers a visual overview of AWS resource performance with proactive notifications about anomalies and detailed reporting with in-depth reports about AWS usage and health metrics. In this way, you can also read our article to monitor AWS EC2 with MetricFire.

Conclusion

The cloud can be a powerful tool for businesses, and AWS is a significant player in the game. Its wide range of services and free tier options make it a great place to start your cloud journey. And don't forget MetricFire to be your cloud monitoring buddy! 

AWS is one of the most popular cloud providers, offering many services. Some other platforms have ensured compatibility between their services and AWS so that their customers can be at ease. Once you sign up for a free MetricFire trial, you can easily send metrics to Hosted Graphite, visualise your data in pre-made dashboards, and store your data for up to two years.